Celebrating Trans Identity as an Icon of Divinity

“Beloved comrade, high-hearted rebel…
[They] never glimpsed your shining essence,
Earth-trapped star on lonely height.”

—Pauli Murry, “For Pan”

In honor of Transgender Day of Visibility I reflect on the power of nonbinary experience to be an icon of divinity for all of us. Like a deity who incarnates

in an animal shed, an unwed refugee who is the mother of God, a Moabite resident alien who is great-grandmother to King David – what society despises turns out to be anointed. Something achingly beautiful, wise, defiant arises among these exiles in whom we witness the face of the divine.  We may have been taught to despise or fear gender diversity. But as icons of the divine, trans identities offer a glorious interruption of mental patterns that tyrannize us with internalized or externalized contempt or fear or indifference.

Icons of the Divine

The variations of trans identity are as numerous as individual lives. The daughter of an early 20th century Scottish laird transitions to a male identity, inherits his land and title in the midst of his staunchly Calvinistic community that seems unfazed by his changes. An impoverished 18th century English girl reappears as a medical student and passes as a doctor in Her Majesty’s navy for decades. A jazz pianist, married several times, is “discovered” to be female upon his death. Biawacheeitchish, Woman Chief, was a warrior and leader of the Crow who maintained four wives. We learn of any number of “female husbands” who were accepted into their communities as workers and church elders. We encounter Iranian trans activist Maryam Khatoon Molkara, and the trans heroines of Stonewall.  When one begins to wander around the stories of trans folks in many periods and cultures, it is a special joy to discover how many people carved out long and (mostly) happy lives within communities that cared for them.

Dominant Christianity shuns transgendered people and many trans Americans flee religion as fast as they can. It is easy to forget the spiritual profundity at the heart of this beautiful and unique form of selfhood. To remember transgender as a matter of the spirit, we might look first to non-religious spirituality, as represented, for example by trans Black feminist Marquis Bey. Noting that by one analysis a Black trans woman’s life expectancy is little more than 35 years, Bey insists on a life that not only staves off death “but imbue[s] life with a kind of joy, a kind of pervasive refusitive exuberance, a kind of fugitive hope.” Bey’s “fugitive hope” is founded in the vitality that exceeds the identities scripted for them. Riffing on Black theologian J. Kameron Carter, this refusal and excess “far from trapped in social death, is ‘mystical’ and stateless.” This is a fugitive hope that, even murdered, “won’t stay dead somehow…It is hope that does not and cannot die.” (Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism)

For others, their trans identity draws them more deeply into their religion. Lamya H, an immigrant from an unnamed Moslem country, notes that “Allah has ninety-nine names that expand language and moves beyond what language can express – Al-Qadir, the One with Most Perfect Power Who Does Not Make Mistakes, Al-Shaheed, the All-Observing Witness, Al-Haqq, the Embodiment of Truth. And gender is nowhere within these concepts that define the Divine. God is neither man nor woman nor masculine nor feminine, nor not masculine nor not feminine. This God, who teaches us we can be both and neither and all and beyond and capable of multiplicities and expansiveness. Nonbinary, genderqueer, They, this God that is the God, my God, my Allah. Who created the world and created language and created the first person, Adam, this person who was man and woman and neither and both and not a mistake, never a mistake. Like me.” (Lamya H, Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir)

Joy Ladin, a Jewish trans woman and scholar, notes that being trans makes one a stranger even to those one loves best and yet can bring God ever closer. “God never mistook me for the body others saw. God knew who I truly was, and understood how alone I felt, because God, like me, had no body to make God visible, no face human beings can see.” Because God constantly evades our categories, God will always remain a stranger in our midst. Laden finds here a parallel for embracing and loving the seeming strangeness of trans persons. “Each of us is made in the image of the God who does not fit human categories or roles. All of us, like God, dwell among and love those who cannot fully know or understand us… whether or not we wish to admit it, we all have – the soul of a stranger. From this perspective, the commandment to know the soul of the stranger is more than a summons to social justice…it is part of the spiritual discipline required for a community to make a place for God…who dwells invisibly and incomprehensibly among us. To show that God belongs with us, and that we belong to God – we must…build our lives and communities around knowing the soul of the stranger.” (Joy Ladin, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective)

Loving our ever-adventuring and endlessly loving God, we fall in love with everything our Beloved loves. In this sense, trans people represent a particular kind of icon of the divine. They allow us to adore in a new way this divinity who evades capture in words but bodies forth in endlessly diverse, wild, intoxicating multiplicity.

Pondering the stories of trans people across cultures and epochs, we encounter a unique alchemy when someone crosses over from their gender, from gender binaries, perhaps from gender itself. There is a luminosity in the ability to see and feel the world from a nonbinary perspective. Glimpsing the divine image in nonbinary forms, our trans friends help nontrans folk to enter more deeply into the Beloved’s exuberant delight of in Their creation. If only we saw and felt this, the suffering we feel in the face of violence and contempt might be less consuming. We would encounter an unbearable love that simultaneously breaks and heals our hearts.  In this patchwork quilt of countless trans lives we glimpse the delight of the Beloved in their handiwork – and find our trans and queer and cis and straight and undecided selves contributing our own colors to this astonishing work of art.